Watch a creepy robot draw an even creepier joker

A recent Pew Research study says 51 percent of Americans believe robots will be able to create art indistinguishable from a human's. Well, they might be surprised that robots like those alreadyexist, and one of them's this new mechanical Picasso called Roboartist. Obviously, this robotic arm can't think up its own masterpieces, so its operators feed it images to draw -- once it "sees" its subject, the system uses an image processing tool called Canny edge detector to determine where pen strokes go. Roboartist then uses rows of violet lights under the drawing surface as a guide an algorithm to determine the lines on an A3 paper. If you're curious how its creators assembled the whole thing, Hackaday has its full hardware list (they used an assortment of parts, including Arduino), as well as as a diagram on how its software works. As you can see in the video below, the artistic robot works great and has even successfully sketched an eerie rendition of Heath Ledger's Joker.